Will and Florence were invited with Tallulah to a dinner given at the Savoy Hotel by Sir James Cook. In attendance were other theatrical notables as well as “all sorts of dukes and earls and things,” Will reported. “I was called upon for a speech at dinner, and drank to the health of the British Empire.” Will began by proclaiming American women the most beautiful in the world, expanding on the boast until Tallulah was cringing in embarrassment at his chauvinism. However, he concluded with a deferential flourish that excused all that had come before. “American women are the most beautiful in the world,” he repeated, then paused and said,
“And now I can see why, because they’re descended from the English and the Irish.”
In The Creaking Chair, Tallulah was Anita, the wife of Egyptologist Edwin Latter. Unbeknown to him, his archaeological partner, Carruthers, had arranged for him to be stabbed in Egypt. Thus he is confined to a wheelchair that creaks because his daughter has tinkered with it. She has been pilfering his money to pay her gambling debts and doesn’t want him surprising her in the act. Carruthers and his wife live next door to the Latters, and it is revealed that Mrs. Carruthers had actually been in love with Latter. However, she is now colluding with her husband to fleece Latter of a priceless necklace sent from Egypt.
Anita was one of the most flamboyant roles Tallulah ever acted. Born English in Egypt, she had been kidnapped as a girl by a half-caste couple from the slums of Port Said, who were about to sell her into prostitution when she was rescued by Latter. Seeing the color blue, she is sent into a tizzy, reminded of the blue doors of the Port Said brothels. Tallulah spent the play cowering before blue items of varied description, sprinting up and down stairs, speaking broken French and English, being shot at, biting her husband’s hand in sudden spasms of fury or jealousy: “It is the superabun-dance of excitement that prevents ‘The Creaking Chair’ being one of the best ‘mystery’ plays seen for a long time,” declared The Era.
After Mrs. Carruthers is found murdered, each of the many residents and guests of the Latter household is suspected in turn. But the villain turns out to be Philip Speed, an ersatz journalist who is really a member of the Ulema, a secret society dedicated to driving the archaeological grave robbers out of Egypt. The authors allow him an eloquent defense of his cause. He wonders whether the British government would allow him to pillage Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey in the same way that the treasures of his native country are picked clean by the British.
The Creaking Chair boasted a superlative cast. Latter was played by beetle-browed C. Aubrey Smith, who was a decade away from his long career as a retaining wall of Hollywood character acting. Once again Tallulah was working with Nigel Bruce, who now played the comic role of Holly, the Latters’ devoted but irreverent Scottish butler. Eric Maturin was John Cutting, reporter boyfriend of Latter’s daughter Sylvia. Sam Livesey played the inept detective Oliver Hart. Although it was Smith who was officially credited with the direction, The Stage noted that Gerald du Maurier had also put his directorial oar in.
The Creaking Chair tried out in Wales before opening on July 22, 1924, in London, where The Observer called it a “well-known box of tricks, very well handled, brought in with a more than an ordinary amount of inventiveness and surprise . . . a real sense of comedy and character. . . .” The Era averred that “It is all thrilling while it lasts, even if the story does not bear much investigation.” The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News called it “an entertainment as good as any of its kind, and perhaps the best we have had in London.”
“Miss Tallulah Bankhead makes a hit as Mrs. Latter,” reported The Era.
The Sunday Express commended Tallulah’s ability to make the part of Anita“attractive and almost interesting.” The Stage declared that Anita’s “moodiness and semi-savagery” were “brought out capitally” by Tallulah, while The Observer wrote that “The beautiful Miss Tallulah Bankhead, who can give empty and meaningless performances when she likes, is very good this time.”
The play was launched on a long run. C. Aubrey Smith persuaded her to let him deduct ten pounds a week from her salary to be held in trust. By the time the play closed she had saved three hundred pounds. A steady salary allowed for myriad adventures around London and its environs. But by now Tallulah had realized that Alington was eluding her.
One night, Alington was hosting a large and very dressy affair in a friend’s house on Cheyne Walk, by the Thames in Chelsea. Una Venning drove Tallulah and Audry dressed as servants in caps and aprons. They scooted down to the basement. “We’ve come from Carter & Coser, extra staff.”
Venning idled in the getaway car, as always. “They took some trays up,”Venning recalled, “and it was Tallu who gave the show away. Audry was being dumb and stupid; whereas Tallu was sparkling”—and perhaps serving the food with too careless a flourish. Alington spotted them very quickly. He took Tallulah by the scruff of the neck, led her to the door, and dumped her down the front steps. As they fled the scene, Tallulah’s bravado was at its most defiant: Ha, ha, it hadn’t come off! On to the next.
Joe O’Donohue, an American socialite visiting London in the early 1930s, asked the elderly Duchess of Rutland if it was true that Tallulah had once been engaged to Alington. “Only she thought so, my dear, and Napier was far too well informed of what he had to do for the Empire to even consider it.”
Instead, Tallulah’s life was taking a very different turn. Her need to affirm her own desirability was emerging as perhaps the strongest motivation in her life—one might say even stronger than her own libido. It led to her seemingly rampant promiscuity, which can be traced to her first years in London. No longer subject to her family’s surveillance, Tallulah ran wild.
Fabia Drake was two years younger than Tallulah, and was cast in The Creaking Chair as Tallulah’s stepdaughter. In her memoir, Blind Fortune, Drake writes that Tallulah was “curiously weak where sex was concerned.”
One night, Tallulah asked Drake to join her at dinner with a newspaper columnist “because I know he’ll want to sleep with me,” Tallulah said, “and I can never say ‘No.’ ”
With a defiant bravado, Tallulah seemed to proclaim her behavior the proper template for modern young women. She “could not make me out at all,” Drake writes. “She found my virginity an absurdity: ‘Such a shocking waste, darling, with your figure.’ ” Tallulah accepted Drake’s “condition” in the end and gave up trying to proselytize her into affairs. “We became genuine, if unlikely, friends; her humor was irresistible . . . and her warmth and generosity.”
The economically self-sufficient woman could avail herself of new opportunities for sexual activity outside marriage, but she often remained as badly uninformed as her mother had been, with results that could be catastrophic. Tallulah needed to look no further than her fellow actress Meggie Albanesi. Albanesi was extraordinarily gifted. “In the theater, impeccable,”
Clifford Mollison recalled. “Out of the theater, all over the place.” Basil Dean, who had guided Albanesi’s career, attributes to her Catholic upbringing her refusal to take any precautions against pregnancy. Abortion was illegal and even the wealthy were forced to seek out whomever they could; in Ann Andrews’s words, “You had to have some weird nurse with a shoehanger or something. . . .” In December 1923, Albanesi died at age twenty-three from a mishandled abortion.
Tallulah may have been prey to the same conflict that Albanesi apparently experienced. No matter how defiantly and how speedily she had shed the strictures of her grandmother and of her early religious training, they could not be discarded lightly.
Andrews related a story that Tallulah had told her about her first pregnancy and subsequent abortion. Lesbian playgirl Jill Carstairs was sailing her yacht down the Thames on an overnight trip. On board she was hosting a party that included Audry Carten’s sister Waveney, who Andrews said was affectionately called “George.” Tallulah was not asked, nor was Waveney’s husband. Tallulah and he were somehow left together, and out of spite, Tallulah
flirted with Waveney’s husband and became pregnant for the first time. The story is sketchy, and according to David Herbert, who knew all the parties involved, Waveney Carten was not called George. But it has an unmistakable ring of truth. Rejection of any kind unleashed from Tallulah the fury of a wounded animal. Her need for professional, emotional, and sexual affirmation was unrelenting. “On the surface all confidence, all swagger and strut, inside I churned with doubt,” she writes in Tallulah. “Any minute the clock might strike twelve and I’d be back in a hall bedroom at the Algonquin, or, worse yet, in Grandfather’s yard at Jasper.”
Tallulah had doted on Cathleen Nesbitt’s infant son and she developed a quasi-maternal relationship with Audry Carten’s brother Kenneth, who was eight years younger than Tallulah. In Tallulah’s mind there was no question that she would have children one day, but also no question of delivering an illegitimate child. She was convinced such an indiscretion would end her career—and she was probably right.
The emotional resonance of the story Andrews told is enhanced by the way that Tallulah described a gruesome punishment for her misbehavior.
She was three months pregnant by the time an abortionist was located; he apparently administered some kind of saline solution. Her friend Oggie Lynn had solicited an invitation to a noblewoman’s estate, where Tallulah would have presumably been able to undergo the induced delivery incog-nito. Soon after they arrived, however, Tallulah was writhing on the floor in agony. There was no choice but to call a doctor. The fetus was delivered, and Tallulah remained ill in bed for the next few days, then returned to London, where she was confined to bed for two weeks. And yet Tallulah continued to be as reckless as Albanesi: she would have four abortions before she was thirty. It may have been only luck that enabled her to survive.
Modern Wives
“Yes, we’re still speaking. Aren’t you all surprised?”
In November 1922, Tallulah had been present at one of the greatest Broadway openings of the century: Rain, starring Jeanne Eagels. “It’s the first time I ever heard cheering in an audience,” Tallulah recalled in 1964.
“She was so magnificent.” John Colton and Clemence Randolph had adapted a short story by Somerset Maugham, featuring as heroine Sadie Thompson, a prostitute deported to a South Seas island. Persuaded to accept salvation by a zealous reverend who does not realize his own lasciviousness, Sadie returns with a vengeance to her old life when she comprehends the truth.
Despite the newly frank postwar climate, Rain might not have been palatable but for the casting of Eagels, whose turned-up nose and air of fragility might as easily have suited her to playing Pollyanna. Six years before Rain, Eagels made a silent, The World and the Woman, that survives today and anticipates Rain’s depiction of a fallen woman’s attempted rise.
Sullen and metallic as she walks Manhattan streets, beatific after finding religion as a maid in the countryside, Eagels’s performance in the film demonstrates how in Rain she would have artfully fused the polarized archetypes of woman. She was virgin and whore at one and the same time.
Tallulah’s persona was equally able to seamlessly fuse the two polarities, and when Charles Cochran first saw her in New York in 1922, he tried unsuccessfully to option the play for her. It was instead Basil Dean who was able to option Rain for production in London. Once Dean learned that Eagels had decided not to come to London, he immediately offered the role to Tallulah and was willing to wait until The Creaking Chair had creaked its last. As the months went on, the humor in the script was broadened and heightened, spilling over into antics among the cast. In 1928, Tallulah described one incident: in act 2, Nigel Bruce as the butler was to hand her a pair of mud-stained slippers, implicating her in a late night visit to the murder victim. At one performance Bruce approached her, she turned to take them, but in the palm of his hand lay a pair of patent-leather doll’s shoes. “I could not help it,” Tallulah recalled. “I simply broke down and laughed. So did the audience.”
This hilarity onstage and in the audience finally came to an end in February 1925, and Tallulah turned her attentions to pursuing the part in Rain that she wanted desperately but that was not yet definitely hers. Maugham, who of course had written many successful plays, retained casting approval over this adaptation of his fiction. Dean writes in his memoir, Seven Ages, that where casting was concerned, Maugham “had a habit of pretending indifference until the last moment when he would suddenly pounce, with a decisive yea or nea that was usually an expression of personal like or dislike.” Maugham had actually already declared a preference for Fay Compton, who had successfully starred in other plays of his. Perhaps Maugham thought that the ladylike Compton would provide an intriguing casting against type in the Eagels manner, but Compton’s persona was really too genteel to be seriously considered.
Tallulah wanted the part so badly that she was willing to sign a decidedly unorthodox contract with Dean:
I agree to play the part of Sadie Thompson at a salary of forty pounds per week. I note that the management is to commence the production of the play not later than 30th June, 1925. I agree that if Mr. Somerset Maugham should definitely disapprove of my engagement, I will cancel it and your company will not be under liability to me in respect to it.
Tallulah was also willing to accept Dean’s suggestion that she return to the U.S. to see Eagels perform Rain once again. As it happened, Dean was also going to New York to consult with Maugham. Tallulah arrived in New York on February 24, 1923, on the S.S. Berengeria. Her sister was at the pier to greet her.
Eugenia and Tallulah were never as close as adults as they had been as children. They no longer needed each other to face the traumas of their childhood situation, and the rivalries that had plagued them even as girls could still flare up just as violently. But they also enjoyed each other’s company for short spells, and tried to the very end of Tallulah’s life to act as sisterly as their temperaments permitted.
In New York, Dean told Tallulah that Maugham had gone to Washington, and Tallulah resolved to follow him and plead her case. Dean felt that she was making a mistake since Maugham “did not like aggressive women.” Maugham, in fact, did not like women at all as a rule. Most particularly he did not like his wife, Syrie, who was one of the leading interior decorators of the day, and an active hostess and good friend of Tallulah’s.
But Tallulah made the mistake of not heeding Dean’s warning. She saw both Maugham and her father in Washington, and then revisited Eagels’s Sadie Thompson in Pittsburgh. Tallulah intended to return to England on the same ship as Dean and Maugham, but on Dean’s advice, on March 22she left New York on the S.S. Caronia. “Frustrated and miserable,” Tallulah didn’t leave her cabin once during the crossing, but saturated herself in Sadie by playing jazz records from the second act of Rain, spinning them unceasingly while she worked on her part.
Her sights set on Rain, Tallulah had turned down two leading roles in the London production of Frederick Lonsdale’s Broadway hit comedy Spring Cleaning. She could have played either the straying bourgeois wife or the prostitute her husband brings home to shame her out of her infidelity. Tallulah was also offered the chance to play either wife or mistress in Tarnish, another proven import from Broadway. But she “wanted Sadie to be my first all-out hussy.”
In London, Maugham watched two days of rehearsals and then pounced. Dean summoned Tallulah to his office and told her that Maugham did, in fact, definitely disapprove of her Sadie Thompson. Tallulah’s dismissal was both disappointment and embarrassment, for it was and is almost unheard of to fire a star two days into rehearsals. Tallulah later surmised that she had put everything into her first days’ rehearsal and given a performance that reflected her idolatry of Eagels, reproducing too slavishly what Sadie’s originator had done. She also wondered if at some point she had personally offended Maugham by imitating his stutter, unwitting mimicry being a reflexive habit of hers.
“I had the bother of getting rid of [Tallulah],” Maugham wrote a close friend. “It was
more bother than you would imagine since she used every scrap of influence she had to sway me and when I finally put my foot down I was the object of the obloquy of all her friends.”
On the sidewalk, “sobbing as I had not sobbed since foiled as a child,” Tallulah encountered Mary Clare, with whom she had acted in Conchita. Clare took her to a tea room and tried to console her. That night, in the apartment at 44 Curzon Street to which she had moved in February, Tallulah gave “one of my phoniest performances,” her only formal suicide attempt. Tallulah changed into her Sadie Thompson costume and put one of Sadie’s 78s on the gramophone. She swallowed twenty aspirins, scribbled a suicide note—“It ain’t goin’ to rain no moh”—and lay down on her intended bier. Her farewell message contained an additional irony since London had been subject to a monthlong deluge. As she waited for the end, Tallulah envisioned crowds, “curious and muted,” at her door, restrained by impassive policemen. She saw a path cleared for the coroner to enter . . . headlines in all the papers . . . transatlantic cables pulsing with the tragic news . . . and, of course, “Maugham stoned in the streets!”
The next morning, a phone call awakened her. Tallulah felt perfectly fine and even better when she’d gotten off the phone. Producer Tony Prin-sep relayed an invitation from Noël Coward to star opposite Edna Best in his play Fallen Angels, due to open in less than a week. Best’s costar, Margaret Bannerman, had had a nervous breakdown. When Coward himself called to talk to her, Tallulah demanded one hundred pounds a week, sixty more than she’d agreed to for Rain; Coward agreed if she could learn the part so that no delay in the opening was necessary. (In 1928, however, Tallulah would admit that Coward had offered to delay the curtain if she needed more time.)
“I don’t give a good goddam if I play this or not,” Tallulah had announced to Coward when he balked at her salary request. But in truth, she would have cared very much about Fallen Angels. Four years after she had met him in Manhattan, Coward’s name was now on everyone’s lips in theatrical London. And the part was perfect for her: Julia Sterroll, a bourgeois London wife who receives a note from an old flame that he is arriving from Paris for a visit. Jane Banbury, Julia’s best friend since childhood, has also shared Maurice’s affections, as Julia well knows. But the two women have consigned the affair to the past and believe that their lives will never again be turned upside down by passion. When Jane appears half hysterical on her doorstep, Julia learns that Jane has received an identical note from Maurice. Jane insists that she and Julia should flee rather than succumb to temptation. But with their husbands conveniently planning a golf trip, the two women cannot resist. Julia orders a lavish meal. Dressed to the nines, she and Jane become besotted on food and drink, increasingly frustrated and quarrelsome as they wait in vain for Maurice to appear. Finally Jane storms out, claiming that she is leaving to fulfill a private audience with none other than Maurice.
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